Welcome to West

Teachers can have meaningful impacts on students’ lives, and this couldn’t have been more true for social studies teacher Camille Crossett ’15. After attending high school at West, she was inspired by her teachers to become one herself.  “The one thing that made me actually really want to teach social studies was [that] I went to school here, and Mitch Gross was my AP U.S. History teache...

For English teacher Amari Nasafi, all it took to change his entire career path was a new literature course. After teaching Language Arts 7 at Northwest Junior High for 9 years, he decided to take up the opportunity to teach English 9 and the first African-American Literature class at West High. Nasafi returned to in-person learning as soon as possible after briefly teaching online during the 2020-202...

Many teachers who end up at West come for job opportunities, but social studies teacher Michael Clark had a unique reason to want to work here. After studying political science and economics at the University of Iowa, Clark moved to Texas where he taught for 30 years.  However, it had always been Clark’s dream to teach at Iowa City West High School. Just when he had decided to retire, he was...

One moment, art teacher Emily Magnuson was riding her bike through Chinatown in New York City on her way to work for an artist. The next moment, she was back in Iowa recovering from cancer. Magnuson hadn’t originally envisioned herself teaching art at West, but clearly, life had other plans for her. “I just saw [Iowa City] with a new perspective,” Magnuson said. “Being a cancer survivor a...